Tag Archives: Anti-Semite

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President Reuven Rivlin has refused to meet with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter during his upcoming visit to the region, due to his stances over recent years seen as “anti-Israel.”

In recent years, Carter has become one of the most prominent critics of Israel, notably when during last summer’s war with Hamas he denounced the IDF’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza as illegitimate.

An Israeli diplomatic official told The Jerusalem Post’s Hebrew sister publication Ma’ariv that the Foreign Ministry recommended Rivlin not meet with Carter, in order to transmit the message that those who harm Israel will not meet with the president.

Carter is reportedly expected to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories in the coming weeks.

Carter has criticized successive U.S. administrations for failing to clinch an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. He has advocated controversial positions, chief among them that the West should engage Hamas in diplomatic negotiations.

After Republicans blocked the nomination earlier this month, they ultimately allowed for an up-or-down vote on Tuesday. The margin was historically close, with 58 senators supporting him and 41 opposing in the end.

Though Hagel is himself a former Republican senator, the resistance to his nomination showed an unusual level of distrust among many senators toward the man chosen to lead the Defense Department – at a time when the country is trying to wind down the Afghanistan war, while assessing emerging threats from Iran, Syria and elsewhere in the turbulent Middle East and North Africa.

Republicans had earlier held up the nomination largely over demands for more information from the Obama administration on the Sept. 11 Libya attacks.

But they also raised serious and recurring concerns about Hagel’s record of past statements and votes on everything from Israel to Iran to nuclear weapons.

Sen. John McCain, a leading Republican, clashed with his onetime friend over his opposition to President George W. Bush’s decision to send an extra 30,000 troops to Iraq in 2007 at a point when the war seemed in danger of being lost. Hagel, who voted to authorize military force in Iraq, later opposed the conflict, comparing it to Vietnam and arguing that it shifted the focus from Afghanistan.

McCain called Hagel unqualified for the Pentagon job even though he once described him as fit for a Cabinet post.

“Twelve days later, nothing. Nothing has changed,” the Democrat said on the Senate floor. “Sen. Hagel’s exemplary record of service to his country remains untarnished.”

Reid blamed partisanship over Obama’s second-term national security team for the delay. Both Reid and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, a Democrat, warned that it was imperative to act just days before automatic, across-the-board budget cuts hit the Pentagon.

Hagel will succeed Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and join Obama’s retooled national security team. Hagel’s nomination bitterly split the Senate, with Republicans turning on their former party colleague and Democrats standing by Obama’s nominee.

Republicans also challenged Hagel about a May 2012 study that he co-authored for the advocacy group Global Zero, which called for an 80 percent reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons and the eventual elimination of all the world’s nuclear arms.

The group argued that with the Cold War over, the United States can reduce its total nuclear arsenal to 900 without sacrificing security. Currently, the U.S. and Russia have about 5,000 warheads each, either deployed or in reserve. Both countries are on track to reduce their deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 by 2018, the number set in the New START treaty that the Senate ratified in December 2010.

In an echo of the 2012 presidential campaign, Hagel faced an onslaught of criticism by well-funded, Republican-leaning outside groups that labeled the former senator “anti-Israel” and pressured senators to oppose the nomination. The groups ran television and print ads criticizing Hagel.

Opponents were particularly incensed by Hagel’s use of the term “Jewish lobby” to refer to pro-Israel groups. He apologized, saying he should have used another term and should not have said those groups have intimidated members of the Senate into favoring actions contrary to U.S. interests.

The nominee spent weeks reaching out to members of the Senate, meeting individually with lawmakers to address their concerns and seeking to reassure them about his policies.

Hagel’s halting and inconsistent performance during some eight hours of testimony at this confirmation hearing last month undercut his cause, but it wasn’t a fatal blow.

There was no erosion in Democratic support for the president’s choice and Hagel already had the backing of three Republicans – Sens. Thad Cochran, Mike Johanns and Richard Shelby. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also switched to support Hagel in the final vote.

Last year Ron Paul said that the CIA perpetrated a coup over the United States. “There’s been a coup, have you heard? It’s the CIA coup. They’re in businesses, in drug businesses.” That fits in as just another part of the wacky world of Ron Paul that has spanned decades of denigrating blacks, assigning all sorts of crazy conspiracies to the US government, and above all hatred for Israel. It is a disgusting sin that this man is a political candidate for anything much less for the GOP nomination for President of the United States.

A lot of the credit for exposing the worst of Paul’s outrages belongs to James Kirchick who in 2008 wrote a short piece for The New Republic detailing what he found in an archive of Ron Paul’s racist newsletters.

Also back in 2008, then Fox News host John Gibson had a must hear interview with Kirchick asking why so many white supremacists and racists were in such slavish support of Ron Paul when he ran for president in 2008.

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Aside from his racist newsletters, Kirchick notes that in 1994, Paul predicted a “holocaust” against South African whites and then advocated for a separate white state in South Africa. Kirchick also says Paul seemed to support the same thing in America.

This week Kirchick wrote a follow up piece on Paul’s 1970s era newsletters that is much more informative than his 2008 piece. In the piece published by The Weekly Standard Kirchick gives a lot more examples of the sort of racist nonsense these newsletters disgorged onto subscribers.

Paul defends himself against the contents of his newsletters by claiming that he never much bothered to read what was being published under his name by his various publishing firms and projects. He then claims not to have supported the racism and off the wall conspiracy theories contained in them.

Kirchick sums his latest piece up with this:

Paul’s more mainstream supporters have always explained away his popularity with 9/11 “Truthers” as an unfortunate consequence of his altruistic, if at times naïve, libertarian ethos: The man just loves freedom so much that he’s loath to turn away backers who may think differently from him. To anyone who bothers to look into Ron Paul’s record, that claim is simply not credible.

Now, let’s look at this young Mr. Kirchick. He is generally centrist, sometimes left of center, to be sure. Kirchick is also gay. However, he calls himself a “gay recovering leftist,” and supported the Iraq war and other military interventions of the Bush era. He has in the past preferred the label “libertarian” to any other. He is one of the few writers that has found outlets in both left and right leaning magazines and newspapers. So, there is his pedigree for those interested.

For me, I’ve read all of Kirchick’s articles on Paul and his points seem quite solid to me. Understanding Kirchick’s political proclivities and taking those into consideration, I find what he’s written about Paul to be solid.

What it reveals to me is the utter shame that Ron Paul is thought to be a worthy candidate in any GOP primary for any position whatever. I tend to see that his fan base of racists, Jew haters, and conspiracy nuts don’t tend to vote for the most part and in talking to many of his ardent – and cultic – supporters over the last few years I see people that do not fit in at all with the rest of the GOP. In fact, in talking to his supporters I find few of them have any knowledge at all of politics outside of “Doctor Paul’s” take on it. They see the whole world through the Paul prism and aren’t well informed otherwise. I also feel that most of them will just fade away once Paul himself finally goes away in 2012 (Paul announced that he won’t run for reelection to his House seat, so unless he wins the White House his political career seems to be over).

I’d like to note that this is no new position for me. Back in September I wrote a similar piece lambasting Ron Paul. In that piece I also note that Paul appeals to only on small wing of the GOP: the economic wing. I noted then and still believe that he is a disaster for the national security wing and the family values wings of the party. A candidate that appeals to only one third of a party base is unelectable.

But even that appeal is among people that are blissfully unaware of his racist past, his associations with wackos, and his support of every conspiracy theory that have come down the pike from the Bilderbergers to the one that claims the CIA started the AIDS virus.

Finally, even if Ron Paul was able to credibly claim he isn’t really an anti-Semite, the fact that he has for decades and until this very day accepted the support of and cavorted with such people is a disqualifier.

The death toll from a hostage standoff at a Catholic church in Baghdad has risen to 58, police officials with the Iraqi Interior Ministry said Monday.

Seventy-five others were wounded in the attack by armed gunmen Sunday, the officials said, adding that most of the casualties were women and children. Two priests were also among the dead as well as 17 security officers and five gunmen.

“All the marks point out that this incident carries the fingerprints of al Qaeda,” Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul Qader Obeidi said on state television Sunday.

He said that most of the hostages were killed or wounded when the kidnappers set off explosives inside the church.

At least two of the attackers were wearing explosive vests, which they detonated just minutes before security forces raided the church, the police officials said.

The Islamic State of Iraq later claimed responsibility for the attack through a statement posted on a radical Islamic website. The umbrella group includes a number of Sunni extremist organizations and has ties to al Qaeda in Iraq.

“The Mujahedeens raided a filthy nest of the nests of polytheism, which has been long taken by the Christians of Iraq as a headquarter for a war against the religion of Islam and they were able by the grace of God and His glory to capture those were gathered in and to take full control of all its entrances,” the group said on the website.

Pope Benedict XVI said Monday that he was praying “for the victims of this absurd violence – all the more ferocious in that it hit defenseless people gathered in the house of the Lord, which is home to reconciliation and love.”

Survivors of the ordeal said they were about to begin Sunday night services when the gunmen entered the church, according to Martin Chulov, a journalist for the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper who was on the scene. A priest ushered the congregants into a backroom, Chulov reported that survivors said.

At one point, one of the gunmen entered the room and threw an unidentified explosive device inside, causing casualties, Chulov said.

The U.S. military spokesman said that as many as 120 people were taken hostage.

The gunmen seized the hostages after attacking the Baghdad Stock Market in the central part of the Iraqi capital earlier Sunday, police said. Four armed men entered the nearby Sayidat al-Nejat church after clashing with Iraqi security forces trying to repel the stock market attack.

Iraq’s Interior Ministry told CNN that gunmen attacked the stock market to distract Iraqi security forces who were outside the church to protect it.

A military jury on Sunday gave teen terrorist Omar Khadr a 40-year prison sentence for killing an American commando in Afghanistan, but the sentence was merely symbolic.

The U.S. already had agreed to limit Khadr’s prison time to eight years, and Canada has said it would allow Khadr to serve the bulk of his sentence there. Canada had been publicly cagey about its agreement to the deal.

What is going on here? A station in Delaware did not run the Christine O’Donnell program this morning even though the 30 minute program was paid for. They said they “forgot” to air it.

The ad was supposed to air on Sunday night. They forgot then, too. The O’Donnell Campaign released the following statement: “It’s still unclear as to why the local cable channel failed to air the half-hour long special.”

Notice that the White House stopped talking about “Recovery Summer” a while ago? Today’s new releases from Commerce may help explain why. Personal income dropped for the first time since the technical beginning of the recovery in July 2009.

Not surprisingly, consumer spending slowed even with the back-to-school sales season. How did Reuters report the news? Take a guess.